Broken was absolutely perfect to put into a multi-disc player along with TMBG's Apollo 18, which contains "Fingertips", a suite of 21 very short songs. Set it to shuffle songs from everything in the player, and enjoy your sonic whiplash
Was this better with the crazily fast-loading chonka-chonk slam-slam nature of a Pioneer 6-disc cartridge changer, or with something slower and perhaps more-civilized like a period-correct Technics 5-disc changer, with its nearly-silent and relatively exquisite, seemingly-careful demeanor?
(Both have their merits, but I unfortunately have neither at hand. And I only have one of these 2 albums. And one of those albums is the original Broken, which only has 6+2 tracks across two discs instead of 99 tracks on one disc.
And how do the 91 silent tracks on a more-common release of Broken affect things compared to the 26 musical tracks that the original 6+2+18 track-count ensemble may entail, in terms of inter-song delay or any other such thing on a real multi-disc changer?
I know TMBG fairly well, and NIN very well, and I enjoy the fuck out of gear, but I have so many questions.)
(I vaguely jest above, but Spotify only shows me 18 tracks on Apollo 18. And only one of them is Fingertips. Am I looking at this wrong?)
Presumably Spotify has glommed all the Fingertips into one file. On the original CD release it was twenty-one separate tracks; there was a bit in the liner notes that explicitly encouraged you to put it on shuffle. https://tmbw.net/wiki/Fingertips
I could not tell you what brand the all-in-one turntable/radio/tape deck/cd player I had at the time was. There was a big tray with room for five CDs and I have absolutely no memory of how much noise it made when switching from one disc to another, and every physical object involved in this affair is long gone in a hurricane.
I suspect both CDs should be easy to find used copies of, if you have the appropriate hardware and want to experience the tension of not knowing if the next song you hear is going to be Trent bitching, a brief moment of silence, a Fingertip, or whatever else you put in the player. Given my tastes at the time this would have probably been Skinny Puppy, Ozric Tentacles, and Björk, but do whatever feels like the most interesting possible choice; I have a disc lying around now that’s nothing but forty iterations of Satie’s Vexations and that would have certainly been a prime choice for this little game.
There wasn't really much effort involved. Pick a few discs off the CD rack that I thought will clash interestingly, load up the cd tray of the cheap all-in-one turntable/tape deck/radio/cd unit I had in my room, hit the 'shuffle' button until it tells me it's gonna shuffle everything together, hit play.
Looking Fantomas up on Wikipedia makes it sound like they'd go pretty well with "twenty tracks that sound like the choruses of twenty different songs" and "ninety-something 1s blank tracks plus a few industrial songs", though.
